" One night he had a dream. In the dream he had wings. He could go anywhere. So he took off, but found himself hovering just above his home and his land. Because he wanted to escape from the scene vertically, not horizontally. From this height he could see his life altogether-the cow which had recently broken a leg, the soothing tree, and along with this, a living form which he couldn't quite identify"Madhvi, who has situated herself in the space of contemporary art practice, reverts for inspiration, from time to time, to her childhood village left far behind. The two inversely symmetrical positions renegotiate the rural and the contemporary in different manners.
-Deepa 1Traditional folk and tribal artists of India are generally not known for doing autobiographical work, in which the artist himself or herself would appear as a character. Ganga Devi, the renowned Mithila artist, once did a series of paintings based on her experiences when she was suffering from cancer.She used an iconized image of herself which recurred as the central character in several individual panels to build a continuous narrative of her life.
Madhvi Parekh's images of fantasy and childhood memories, spread over her entire work, have this iconic-symbolic quality. They keep recurring- now in the centre-stage, now floating accross the landscape, sometimes framed within a window or door, or sometimes making their presence felt by their absence. When the same characters and objects such as anthropomorphic animals, birds with transparent bodies, smiling snakes heads, torsos, trees and buildings keep appearing and reappearing in her work, over the years, they assume the role of pictographs which, when reused in different contexts, continuously renegotiate the emic and etic structures of the language of her expression.
In most discussions about Madhvi's art, questions are raised whether it is rooted in a form of 'child art' or 'folk art'. While situating her work in either of these monolithic categories, critics have often confused between the images stemming from her memories of childhood and thise found in child art created by the child, and between the images derived from the memory of rural life and those emanating froma traditional folk art per se.
Madhvi does not come from any constituted tradition of folk atr, though her images do speak of rural as well as childhood memories as much as of child art practice.
Madhvi was not trained in an art school but it is not that she has had no exposure to the world of modern art or to new materials and techniques. She's poised on the fence between her personal world, 'unspoilt' by 'training' and that of formal history of art which continuously and consciously explores new possibilities of expression and thereby, in principle, availing to herself a broader space to wander about.
As such Madhvi is not a folk artist nor does her work belong to an established ideological or aesthetic movement of modern art, though one often reads qoutes from Paul Klee, Miro, Picasso or Clemente in her work. In her paintings, as in her life, she keeps transgessing between the two worlds, i.e., the one of her rural inheritance and of the universal modern art practice, renegotiating both. In this sense the staightjacket terms such as 'outsider art', 'neo-primitivism' or 'native' would not effectively apply to her. Madhvi is a contemporary Indian artist,not anxious to negate her rural inheritance, and at the same time reflecting in her work the contemporary world- it'spressures, it's ideological tensions, it's proclivity for fragmentation, and above all, it's eclectic art language. Madhvi is not a neo-primitivist in the sense that she is not a modernist who, from that position, explores primitive aesthetics and appropriates it in her work on modernist terms. If there is a 'primitive' element-simplification of form, emblematisation, linearity or elimination of depth, shading and overlap, and intuitive rather than designed, organization of space- it emerges from the conceptual and narrative pictorial devices which children employ, an element which shares certain commonalities with child art. But one feature of primitive art-inherited, community-based collectivity of idiom, and beliefs and practices, which provide a certain stylistic certitude to each individual genre- is not found in child art. Though Madhvi builds upon her childhood memories including her own language of expression that she might have developed as a child, as she grows, she lends to it the strength and complexities through layering of of cultural and artistic references- an element absent in child art.
Madhvi has been painting for more than thirty years. Her "craft-like sense of decorativeness", "cosmic sense that is at once the attribute of folk art and women's art" and her "handling of everyday life, including labour, leisure and ritual in the form of (mock) fable "2 , all stemming primarily from her rural inheritance, have undergone an intense process of continuous interface with the modern, initially arising out of the programme of training drawn by Paul Klee in his Pedagogical Notebooks, and meticulously followed by her.3 combining her her rural background, her child-like sensitivity and the "modernism's logic of abstraction....in a quasi-modernist manner"4 , she has evolved an effective language of expression which has become as natural to her as her mother tongue.
When working with water-colours, Madhvi almost lustily, revels in the translucent luminosity offered by the medium, using it to create a space within a space which then comes handy for narrativising a legend or the everyday life. A new element makes it's presence felt, in her recent works , pertaining to popular imagery culled from everyday life-cinema house like gaudy arches and curtains, windows having fancy colouration and motifs, scenes from the beach life of Mauritious. She often enshrines the main character or scene of her narrative in the centre, while detailing the related images in the margins.
Witha personal well articulated language of expression, Madhvi positions herself in a space outside the tradition-modernity discourse, while crossing borders both ways.
-Jyotindra Jain
1 Deepa Parekh, Fables of Everyday Life (Bombay, 1993)
2 Geeta Kapur,"Madhvi Parekh.", in Critical Differences. Contemporary Art from India, (London Aberystywyth Arts Centre, 1993)
3 Pranabranjan Roy, "Madhvi Parekh.Child's World, Mother's Fantasy", in: Expressions and Evocations. Fifteen Contemporary Women Artists of India, ed. Gayatri Sinha (Bombay, Marg Publications, 1996)
4 Kapur, ibid.
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